Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/29

 ceased to penetrate every class of society; and so the king was prevailed upon, six months after the abolition of the Guilds, to withdraw his edict, and restore them. In due time came the Revolution, and destroyed in one day by the storming of the Bastille that for which Germany had striven in vain since 1672, and France since 1614, that is for near two centuries, to do away with by legal means.

You will perceive from this, gentlemen, that however great are the advantages which attend reforms conducted by legal methods, yet they have on all the most important occasions, the one great drawback of an impotence lasting for entire centuries, and on the other hand, that the revolutionary method, terrible as are the drawbacks with which it also is accompanied, has in spite of them the one advantage of attaining speedily and energetically a practical result.

Now fix your eyes, gentlemen, with me for a moment on the fact that the Guilds were inseparably connected with the whole of the social arrangements of the Middle Ages, and you will see at once how the first machine, the spinning jenny which Arkwright invented, contained already in itself a complete revolutionising of those social conditions.

For how could production by means of machinery be possible under the system of Guilds, by which the number of men and apprentices which a master might keep was fixed by law in every locality? Again under this system of Guilds, the different branches of industry were marked off from one another in the most exact manner by law, and each master was only allowed to